University students across North America have been targeted by a new scam campaign that involved the use of fraudulent bioscience, biotechnology, and healthcare job offers to facilitate advance fee fraud since March, according to The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.
Threat actors have sent emails purporting to be interview requests for remote data entry jobs that include PDF attachments listing hardware and software requirements for the position that cost $7,000, with payments either sought upfront or through the target's initial paycheck, a Proofpoint report revealed.
"These are typical behaviors for threat actors perpetrating employment fraud. In some cases, the actor may also ask for cryptocurrency payments to cover the 'shipping expenses' of items they are supposed to purchase," said researchers, who also observed similar tactics, techniques, and procedures leveraged in other job-themed lures.
No specific threat operation has been named by researchers to be behind the campaign.
Included in the exposed dataset labeled "PDL" were individuals' full names, email addresses, phone numbers, location data, professional summaries, and skills, as well as education and employment histories.
Attackers could leverage the issue — which impacts Nexus 3000, 7000, and 9000 series switches with vulnerable NX-OS versions with DHCPv6 activated and are in standalone NX-OS mode — to facilitate continuous crashes of the dhcp_snoop process and a denial-of-service condition.
Higher rewards of up to $250,000 will be given by Google for the discovery of memory corruption flaws in the Chrome browser shown to achieve remote code execution using a non-sandboxed process as part of a more robust vulnerability reward program.